Seeing as Lincoln takes one of history’s greatest icons as its subject matter, it’s been put together by the most famous film director of all time, and it stars the guy who is probably the most respected actor working today, it’s hard to sit down and watch it without bringing any baggage into the theater with you. Will this be the biggest, most crowd-pleasing movie ever? Will it take home all of the golden whosits and whatsits come awards season? Will it be the definitive movie about Abraham Lincoln, encapsulating everything that made this American icon so iconic, while still giving us a peak behind the curtain and helping us understand that he was just a man like any other? Will it finally be another Steven Spielberg classic, coming after a decade that’s seen the magician who made Jaws and Close Encounters slip a bit in the public’s esteem?
It’s hard not to go into Lincoln with questions like this running through your head, but you should do your best not to. Forget Spielberg’s tendency to craft scenes where his actors stand and gawk at visions of grandeur. Forget Daniel Day-Lewis’ reputation as being an actor who can go big places, chew up scenery, and still make you believe in every last detail of what he’s doing. Lincoln is a much subtler, more low key movie than that. This isn’t an epic look at the life of Abraham Lincoln, it’s a focused look at a few months toward the end of it, when he was trying to get the 13th Amendment passed through the House of Representatives. This isn’t a deep, revealing study of Lincoln’s thought processes and the makeup of his moral compass, it’s more a dialogue heavy representation of how politics work on Capitol Hill. Think of it like The Social Network, only instead of deciding whether Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook, we’re deciding whether slavery should be banned in The United States, and instead of everyone talking in Aaron Sorkin dialogue, everyone is talking in Tony Kushner dialogue. Does that sound intriguing, even if it doesn’t quite meet expectations? It should, because it is.
Don’t get me wrong, this is still a Spielberg movie, it’s just a little bit talkier than what you’re used to getting from his films. Instead of focusing on what a huge moment in history the signing of the 13th Amendment was, it focuses more on the politics behind getting bipartisan support for a divisive issue. It’s deals in bribes, appeals to the heart, and back room meetings, and it’s all very pertinent to the last four years we’ve just been through with our current government. Watching Lincoln you get the feeling that everyone always feels that they’re living in the most divided, most crucial period in history, but that probably nothing ever changes and people are currently just as stupid and stubborn as they always were and always will be. It’s just that looking back at the past we tend to overlook the bad, forget the failures, and view the triumphs through rose-colored glasses.
And that’s where that special Spielberg touch comes into play. One of his specialties has always been nostalgia, in conjuring up the feelings of an imaginary time back when everything was supposedly more simple and morality wasn’t so murky. In Spielberg’s hands all of the bribes and fibbing that Lincoln is a party to feel charming, like the sort of trick a kindly grandpa might pull to fool his grandson into eating his peas. And because of the rapid-fire and witty words of Kushner’s script, all of the political grandstanding and blind partisan bickering that goes on in Congress feels like a great show, a grand opera where everyone knows the score and only the most clear-eyed and capable men are able to take part.
Plus, you never forget that everything you’re watching is being shot by Spielberg’s camera. Even a movie like War Horse, that was completely banal in content, was packed full of iconic imagery that could stand next to the most beautiful stuff ever captured on film. Here Spielberg is working with his usual cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, and when they get the chance to frame compelling characters engaged in engrossing dialogue, the effect is a one-two punch that elevates scenes of men arguing around a table toward being true art. For a good example, just look at the scene where Lincoln convinces his cabinet that the time to push the 13th Amendment through is now. Spielberg moves the camera in a 360 degree circle around the entire table while everyone is having their say, and somehow he does it so naturally and so unobtrusively that it doesn’t come off as being showboating artifice. And then, at the crucial moment where Lincoln is getting ready to speak, the camera stops, and we’re the furthest from him we’ve been. Then, as he makes his case, the camera does a slow pull in, slowly adding extra gravity to every word until we’re in tight, reaching critical mass, and we realize that Lincoln has gotten everyone in the room on his side. It’s a masterful example of blocking, timing, performance, and execution, and very few other filmmakers on the planet could have pulled it off and made it look so effortless.
Which brings us to that Daniel Day-Lewis performance. It would be pretty hard to talk about a Daniel Day-Lewis movie without addressing his performance, especially one where he’s bringing Abraham Lincoln to life. It’s cliché at this point to gush about how great this man is, how everything he does is just perfect, and how no other actor on the planet is half as natural while being half as captivating as he is in everything he does. But, good God, is all of that stuff true. DDL is amazing here. He doesn’t just look the part, he doesn’t just project Presidential authority, he manages to do all that while making Abraham Lincoln a living, breathing man who we often don’t think about as even being the President while we watch him operate. He takes the face on the penny and turns him into the nice old man from down the street you stop and have a chat with when you’re out walking your dog. From his gate, to the voice that he’s using, to every last detail of how he just lives in the moment of these scenes, DDL simply becomes Lincoln. And he does it so thoroughly that it isn’t even amazing, it doesn’t feel like a magic trick, it just is. There were two seconds where he was shot in silhouette and he took a little bit too long dramatically putting on his iconic stovepipe hat where the illusion was broken for me, but that slight bit of overzealous grandstanding is lost in a sea of instances where DDL takes the 16th President and makes him completely his own.
Day-Lewis out of the way, that brings us to everyone else. A critique of this film’s acting could go on for paragraphs. Every role in this movie, big and small, is filled with faces that are not only familiar, but delightfully welcome. Phenomenal actors show up and barely even get more than a handful of lines, over and over again. We get a scene where Jackie Earle Haley is trading dialogue with Jared Harris, and it’s just a small thing that exists on the outskirts of the movie that doesn’t have much impact on everything else. That’s how deep this cast is.
Special mention should be given to the trio of James Spader, John Hawkes, and Tim Blake Nelson, who play the rough and tumble lobbyists who Lincoln employs in handling the heavy lifting of all his back room dealings with the House Democrats. They’re all great actors, and they’re all great fun together. More than anyone else though, you have to talk about Tommy Lee Jones. As fierce abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, Jones has found a role that both plays to his strengths and established persona and also manages to push him as a performer. He’s better in this movie than he’s been in anything in a long time, and his performance really counts, because in many ways this movie is Stevens’ just as much as it is Lincoln’s. Perhaps the most important scene of the film is one in which Stevens has to stifle his opinions and push down his emotions so that his bluster and extreme-for-the-times political views don’t sabotage the Amendment in the eyes of the press. It’s a mythic moment that almost feels like first sin—like the very moment when the Republican Party learned how to lie in order to get what they want—and Jones absolutely knocks it out of the park. After watching him go from conflicted to delivering a rapid-fire monologue in this scene, you’ll be upset that he hasn’t gotten the chance to do some screwball romantic comedies over the course of his career.
The only person in the cast who didn’t give a performance that I really cared for was Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln. It’s true that she was asked to portray the most manic character in the film, but she was also the only person who I could always see visibly performing. It probably didn’t help that she shared most of her scenes with DDL, who was playing things as minimally and naturally as you can in a movie like this and likely made her choices appear to be all the more exaggerated. Perhaps this was intentional, as Mary has been viewed by many to be a destabilizing force in Lincoln’s life, but, even with that caveat, it still felt like this wasn’t Field’s best work.
Overall, Lincoln is a strong film that makes really great choices. It’s dialogue heavy and a little long, but with actors this compelling, photography this competent, and a script this well-written, it’s not often that you mind. And thank goodness for the focus on the passing of the 13th Amendment. Too often these sorts of biopics make the mistake of trying to follow their subject along the whole way, from birth to death, and it just becomes too much to cram in, giving no aspect of the subject’s life the focus it deserves and forcing the filmmaker to resort to the sort of overblown filmmaking that Spielberg can sometimes be guilty of in order to try to make up for a lack of depth. It’s much wiser to pick one moment, develop it fully, and try to draw out how that moment encapsulates the subject as a whole.
There were a few missteps along the way. John Williams seemed to think that he was scoring that epic-in-focus, sappy-but-iconic movie that many were expecting from Lincoln. His music intrudes on scenes, almost like a bully, trying to force you to react in certain ways. He doesn’t sink the film or create any cues that are so obtrusive they make the tone farcical, but he does take you out of the story a couple times with sudden realizations that one minute you were absorbed and the next you could feel yourself being manipulated. And there are bookmarking scenes, at the beginning and end of the film, that try to take this fairly focused, simple story and raise it up to those mythic heights. That was a mistake, because Lincoln didn’t need to go there. It had us already, and then it went on rambling, trying to sell what we’d already bought. Happily, they represent just a few minutes out of a two-and-a-half hour film, so this isn’t much of a problem either. Things could have been much worse, especially coming from Spielberg. He very easily could have made a movie where Lincoln’s presence kept stunning everyone around him into mouth-agape silence, like a T-Rex with a neck beard or something, and that would have been horrible.
